The road to Point Cabrillo

On my last trip out to California, I drove north from San Francisco again for the weekend. I've done this kind of trip a few times now: when in San Francisco for work I'll pick up a hire car in Fisherman's Wharf on the Friday afternoon after work, then drive as far north as I feel is sensible in what's left of the evening. I can then spend the rest of the weekend winding my way back south until my flight home, usually on Sunday afternoon.

This time out, I wanted to return to Mendocino: I'd been there briefly last year with a colleague and met some other work friends for dinner but we'd then cut south and inland quite quickly on the Saturday so I wanted to spend a little more time investigating the Mendocino area.

I stayed in the somewhat cheaper town of Caspar, north of Mendocino the night before—on these ‘photography mission’ weekends it's really not about spending money on nice hotels—and then in the morning, I drove out to Point Cabrillo lighthouse as my first stop before hitting Mendocino town itself for lunch.

The ocean drive out to Point Cabrillo brings you down low around Caspar Headlands State Beach, where I took this photograph. One of the main drivers for the weekend was to test out my newly-acquired Bronica GS-1 and the light was so good here I had to pull the car over and jump out with the Bronica and my Fuji X-T1.

The main photograph above was taken on the Bronica and was a lovely start for my new film beast. There's something so special about looking down through the ground glass of a waist-level viewfinder that makes the world look infinitely wondrous and interesting. It's like looking through a portal into a more beautiful version of the world and I can often quite happily walk around just looking through the Bronica viewfinder. There's never quite the same impression on the finished film but that medium format look does shine through; I find medium format gives such a better feeling of depth to an image and of a 3D space compared to smaller formats, even when you're not opening up the aperture for shallow depth of field.

Anyway, I also took a load of shots with the X-T1 (film ain't cheap and I still hadn't processed a roll of film from the Bronica to know it worked, which I've been burned by before). The X-T1 held its own of course and I got this lovely shot below.

At some point I'll write in a bit more detail about the Bronica but in summary, it's a really fun camera to use. It is heavy but I haven't had trouble carrying it around in my backpack on long walks so I don't subscribe to the idea of it as a studio-only camera. My biggest issue so far has been more that I've been so busy recently I haven't been out on a proper photography-focused outing for a while so it hasn't been seeing enough use.